Fabrication units are known in the prior art and are frequently used for producing three-dimensional products for example, such as prototypes or replacement parts. In this case, a distinction is basically made between fabricators which operate by subtraction, by means of which material is removed from a material stock, for example a block full of material, in order to thus produce the product, for example machining, and fabricators which operate by addition, which are often also known as 3D-printers and have the advantage compared with the fabricators initially mentioned that no, or substantially no, material waste occurs when producing a product.
The operating principle of 3D-printers of this kind is essentially based on producing a product in layers by means of physical or chemical curing or melting processes, plastics materials, synthetic resins, ceramics or metals being used as typical materials.
In the context of the disclosure, the term “fabrication unit” includes both fabrication units operating three-dimensionally and, optionally, also such units which operate merely two-dimensionally. A fabrication unit also refers to systems and/or machines which process data, in particular CAD data, in particular in the field of use of Industry 4.0 (the Internet of Things).
In this case, the production basically functions such that, based on a required product, the data describing the product production, for example CAD data, are provided to the fabrication unit or to a unit controlling said fabrication unit, in order to then carry out the manufacture on the basis of these data. In this case, it can optionally be provided for the data describing the product production to be directly capable of activating a fabrication unit, or else for said data describing the product production to first require processing in order to then carry out the product production using the processed data.
Since fabrication units of the type mentioned at the outset are comparatively expensive devices, it has further become common in the prior art for companies to make available their fabrication units for producing products required in customer orders and to make said units available to the customers after the production.
For this purpose, it is provided for a customer interested in producing a product to provide the necessary data describing the product production, i.e. CAD data for example, to a service provider offering to produce a product using a fabricator, and for the service provider to accordingly use said provided data in order to produce the product on the basis of said data.
Typical CAD file formats used in this context are what are known as STL files (surface tessellation language) or VRML files (virtual reality modelling language) or vector files.
In particular in the case of complex products, the files to be sent may accordingly have a significant file size, with the result that, in the prior art, problems thus result from the fact that it takes a long time to upload a file describing the product production, for example a CAD file of the aforementioned type, in particular when it is taken into account that, although many telecommunications providers offer very high download speeds in their Internet data tariffs, the upload speeds are often many times lower.
Service providers wishing accordingly to offer to manufacture products for customer orders on their own fabrication units therefore often face a problem due to the bandwidth available for transmission, in particular when several customers wish to transfer data simultaneously.
In addition, business models are known in the prior art according to which a service provider offers to commission the production of products on its at least one fabrication unit, which products are already stored by the service provider and were originally uploaded by other customers for example and made available for publication. In this case, a customer can usually select a required product from a data catalogue containing a large number of products, which selected product is then manufactured, to order, for the customer.
In this case, it has been found to be problematic that although, if interested, the customers can order precisely the product represented in the data catalogue, this does not permit the product to be individualised according to the wishes of the customer.
According to the current prior art, individualisation of this kind would require that the data in question which describe the product production first have to be transferred from the service provider to customers in order for the customer to make its own modifications to these data, and to send the modified data describing the product production back to the service provider.
As a result, data transport of a significant amount of data is required both for downloading to the customer and for uploading by the customer, which is currently almost impossible on account of the bandwidth restrictions of internet connections, in particular when a service of this kind is used by a number of customers at once.